Quote:
Originally Posted by LeanBurn
It's all roses when the monthly paychecks keep rolling in, you can borrow until you are blue in the face...should a hiccup occur in that monthly paycheck flow, reality steps in and the monster that never sleeps (aka interest and debt) has you by the short and curlies.
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In Alberta it's called "Financial combustion". My buddy managed one of the salvage car auctions out there for years, and business would be OK for a few years, then all of a sudden oil prices would fall. So the oilsands would lay people off. And suddenly, a few weeks later, the auction yard would be full of 6 month old, $60k full load diesel trucks that had been financed out the rear, but had suddenly "been stolen, and then found torched". Riiiiight, and I'm a Chinese jet pilot (I'm not BTW lol).
But we can't blame the manufacturers, they are just financing people that want to spend money on things they don't need. A perfect example is this - I think I am into my Civic CX with 292k Kms for about $750 after auction fees, taxes etc. It's a great little car, gets decent FE, isn't rusty, and I think it's pretty cool. But it's a 23 year old Civic with no stereo in it. I'd be lucky to break even with it. Today at an auction I bought a 2002 Suburban. Gas here is $1.45 a liter at the moment by the way. But, it's black, has grey leather interior, sunroof, DVD, and it's lowered. It has more KMs than my Civic does, but it "looks the part" as it were. I paid $1100 for it. I haven't even picked it up yet, and just from a crappy cell phone picture I took of it someone offered me $3k. I'd love to sell little eco cars for a living, but man they just don't pay the bills. And I guess manufacturers see it the same way. So they make sweet financing deals on the Silverados so that any clod with a pulse can buy a new shiny one, but the Volts get shuffled to the back of the lot. I don't like it, but I totally understand it.
